Privacy page ranking above home page in serps

[Nola504]

I'm using OSE to try and get some clues as to why my privacy page would rank higher than my home page. Could anyone help me figure out which metrics to review to rectify the issue?

My key word is: Mardi Gras Parade Tickets

The url that is ranking is <cite>www.mardigrasparadetickets.com/pages/privacy</cite>

I'm happy to be ranking in the top 3 for the keyword, but I'd rather hoped it wouldn't be my privacy page.

Any help would be awesome,

Cy

[edwardrj]

Here's something else I noticed about OP's site:

Home page outranks privacy page when using site search -- yet home page appears to be filtered out of standard queries.

[Dr-Pete]

I think you need to diagnose the why before you start doing things like 301-redirecting. This could be just a matter of keyword competition or it could signal a serious problem with your home-page. For a privacy page to outrank your home page isn't a good sign, on the surface.

So, first things first - the home-page seems to be indexed. That's a good thing.

As @Cardigan said, you are using the phrase "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets" in every TITLE tag. I don't think that's the full problem, but it can certainly send mixed signals. Even though that's your brand, I wouldn't trail every TITLE with it - it just makes your tags too long and removes a lot of there uniqueness, IMO.

If I search the exact phrase "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets" in Google, you've got 4 pages ranking in the Top 10, none of which are your home page. That's definitely odd. It suggests that your site as a while is doing fine, but that your home-page may be selectively filtered or penalized for that phrase. This could be the repetition, but the impact isn't usually so extreme. It could be a long profile or anchor text issue.

You also don't rank for the exact title phrase "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets 2013", which is starting to look more like a penalty situation or severe technical problem (like malware, as @Deb mentioned). You can check for malware in Google Webmaster Tools, and I'd also check to see if Google can fetch the page properly.

You don't have a ton of links, so I'm not spotting any particularly bad ones. I also don't see you abusing exact-match anchor text much. Unless you've aggressively built links recently that aren't showing up in our system, my gut reaction is that Google thinks there's something wrong with the home-page.

Sorry, I see a and probably the problem. Your domain is almost an exact duplicate of:

http://www.neworleansparadetickets.com/

...including the copy. I think Google is aggressively filtering out your domain. If you're trying to target the same content with different EMDs, you're going to need to make it more unique. Otherwise, the tactic is going to backfire on you.

[Debdulal]

Hi,

Is the Home page of your website is malware affected? When I try to open the Home page, my system got restarted.

[Nola504]

Thanks for your response.

This is a rails site, and I'm working with my developer to fix that issue.

[edwardrj]

Yes, to the above. Fill out your home page with more content and do something about your title tags. Presently the title tag for every page on the site is "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets 2013."

[Nola504]

Thanks for the reply Ruslan,

If I 301 redirect, should I canonical the privacy page to my home page too?

And regarding your second suggestion, should I add more text to my home page so that the text/html ratio on my home page reflects or is better than my privacy page?

[smokin_ace]

Hi Cyril,

What I would suggest to you is to make the 301 redirect from this page to home page. Then create another Privacy Page with slightly different URL. I believe this page has been ranked high because it has more text and better optimised than any other relevant page on your website. Second maybe someone has posted some external links to this page.

Another option can be cross linking. Try to make keyword  "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets" as a link pointing to your home page.

Hope it helps,

Cheers,

Russel